O’Neill will be in Dublin this week and the FAI are planning a press conference but have yet to settle on a day.

After a week of radio silence from both the manager and the association, the Derry man’s take on the twists and turns is eagerly anticipated. So too is a sense of his mood.

O’Neill walked off during a live TV interview immediately after the crushing defeat to Denmark.

Emotions ran high that night, but clarity is needed this week. If he is short-tempered and on the defensive again amid an inevitable barrage of questions, it will be a complete PR disaster and merely fuel his critics further.

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Next week he will travel to the UEFA Nations League launch in Switzerland. John Delaney is provisionally pencilled in for a couple of separate launches this week, but it remains to be seen if the FAI chief will speak to reporters.

The FAI have looked weak and powerless on the back of the unsigned contract controversy.

Everything. Sure, in its strictest interpretation, O’Neill was manager a week ago and remains so today. But it is not business as usual.

Nobody came up smelling of roses from the week that was.

O’Neill’s standing in the eyes of many Irish fans has taken a hammering.

Plenty wanted rid of him before his flirtation with Stoke, believing a fresh approach was required. They will feel ‘stuck’ with him for another two years.

On the flip side, others believe O’Neill is the best manager available to the FAI at this moment in time and that his biggest results - if not the tactics - suggest as much and it is difficult to pick holes in that logic after one finals appearance before falling at the final hurdle in pursuit of another.

WILL ALL OF THIS BLOW OVER AND BE FORGOTTEN ABOUT?

Had Ireland qualified for the World Cup this summer you would say almost certainly.

But they haven’t and this story now shines an entirely different spotlight on what was shaping up to be a truly unremarkable 2018.

It is claimed that O’Neill is energised about moulding a younger Irish team for the inaugural UEFA Nations League in September.

He will need results to go his way in that fledgling tournament to stop fans turning on him even more so going into the Euro 2020 qualifiers which start in March 2019.

They will have followed the events with interest, but don’t expect any of them to have a great deal to say on the matter.

If this was a club environment, where they saw O’Neill day to day, the dynamic might have shifted somewhat.

A sense of ‘Do you really want to be here?’ would have lingered.

But it remains an honour to be picked for your country and there is a genuine bond between this group and the management team, so none of these players will rock the boat - certainly not those younger ones who are looking to cement their standing in the team with the retirements of others coming down the line.